ART REVIEW; Sculpture From the Earth, But Never Limited by It

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: June 24, 2005

WHEN Robert Smithson died at 35, in a plane crash in 1973, overseeing one of his earthworks, he gave the art world its own Buddy Holly. Who knows whether he now is, as the excellent touring retrospective freshly arrived at the Whitney advertises, the most influential postwar American artist. But he certainly fascinates a slew of young art worldlings.

It would be heartening if this were attributable to some longing for a less money-besotted day, one that pressed art to go beyond the upholstered confines of institutions and commerce. The New York art scene of Smithson's time was grittier, angrier and more open to all sorts of splendid, hare-brained, homegrown schemes, of which Smithson had plenty. They helped to shove Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop in various messy new directions. In an era of crabbed imagination and short-term profiteering, the sheer chutzpah of artists like Smithson is instructive.

He was shrewd, caustic, competitive and ingenious. During a career that effectively lasted not even a decade, he anointed himself the spokesman -- and in the process made himself an inevitable target -- for a generation of fellow chest-thumping innovators and troublemakers who were about as amenable to herding as alley cats. Smithson's goal both for radical art and for himself depended on the dissemination of ideas via the printed page, through writings, photographs and film. Native touch, as this show demonstrates without actually diminishing him, was never his forte.

The turning point came in the mid-60's when he proposed making art for an airport in Texas, involving mirrors, cameras and other things he imagined putting out in fields, to be seen from airplanes, opening up sculpture to vast scale, the outdoors and aerial views. A few years later came ''Spiral Jetty,'' 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a 1,500-foot-long coil or fiddlehead, projecting into the remote shallows of Rozel Point on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from the brine shrimp and algae. There is a photograph of him in the show's catalog, young, pockmarked, bespectacled and shaggy, with sketchpad on lap, gazing raptly toward ''Jetty,'' as if into the great beyond, like one of Caspar David Friedrich's romantic loners on a misty mountaintop.

For Smithson, the allusions in his work (he completed ''Jetty'' in 1970) were to lost worlds and imaginary cosmologies. He was as enamored of Borges and Blake as he was of horror movies and the dinosaur displays at the American Museum of Natural History. He read the science fiction of J.G. Ballard (he likened the red Salt Lake to a Martian sea), and he was inspired by geological formations and religious rituals (brought up Roman Catholic, he went through a phase of making religious art), of which pilgrimage was an aspect.

The popular allure of ''Jetty'' was enhanced by Smithson's writings about it, part poetry, part hokum, and by the 16-millimeter color movie he shot of its construction: trucks and loaders lumbering like barosaurs across a prehistoric panorama to his narrative. Cunning and prescient, he grasped that in the modern age a sculpture in the middle of nowhere could have a life separate from itself, through reproductions and other simulacra, which is how most people would see the work. This gap between the real world and its translation into a gallery via photographs, maps or whatever became an abiding theme.

The film of ''Spiral Jetty'' occupies a room in the exhibition. I stopped by to remind myself of the end of it, an aerial view when the sun, reflected in the lens of the movie camera, makes ''Jetty'' evaporate in an epiphany of light. It's treacly and compelling. To watch the film is also to be reminded how heavy machinery and raw materials made Smithson's hamfistedness more or less irrelevant, distancing him from the physical task of making sculpture, but paradoxically making that art more distinctly his own.

''Jetty'' (it's actually smaller than you might think from looking at pictures) acts as a kind of sign outdoors, pointing visitors to the surroundings -- moving attention from center to periphery, where there is not just nature to look at but also rusting cars and a decrepit pier. An ancient sea and industrial ruin, ''the site,'' as Smithson wrote, was ''evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.'' His fascination was with the grandeur of such industrial decay, from which he came.

He was born in New Jersey in 1938 and commuted as a teenager to classes at the Art Students League. (He never went to college.) New Jersey became the periphery of his universe, New York the center.

One day in 1967, he hopped a bus from the big city to stroll around his hometown, Passaic, sporting a Kodak Instamatic and snapping highway abutments and drainage pipes. He published his deadpan travelog in Artforum as ''The Monuments of Passaic,'' opening up a world of artistic inquiry -- and introducing, with comedic ?n, a fresh mythology -- to the dystopian sprawl across the Hudson River from Manhattan.